August 2024 Newsletter Blog Posts
Building Bridges After the Bell: Innovative Strategies to Engage Families in Your Program
Out-of-school time (OST) programs like yours offer a safe place for students to try new things, be themselves, and build lasting connections with peers, mentors, and the community. OST programs can also support and empower families. It takes effort, but with a bit of creativity and a splash of innovation, engaging families can become a delightful adventure rather than a daunting task. Here are some fresh, fun strategies to get families buzzing about your offerings!
Interactive Workshops: Learn Together, Grow Together
Turn traditional open-houses into interactive workshops. Organize hands-on sessions where families can participate in the same activities their students do. For example, if your OST program focuses on STEM, set up a mini-lab where families can build simple robots or conduct fun experiments together. This approach demystifies the learning process and helps family members feel more connected to their child’s educational experience.
Digital Diaries: Share the OST Journey
Create a digital platform where families can follow along with their child’s afterschool adventures. This could be a blog, a social media page (with appropriate privacy protections), or a dedicated app. Share regular updates, photos, and stories about the exciting projects and activities happening in the program. Students of this generation are inherently tech savvy, so let them in on the fun! Encourage students to contribute their own posts or video updates, making the platform a collaborative space that highlights the collective effort of the entire community.
OST Ambassadors: Kids Leading the Way
Empower your students to become “OST Ambassadors.” These are enthusiastic kids who help organize and host family engagement events. They can lead tours, demonstrate projects, or even give presentations. By giving children a leadership role, you not only boost their confidence but also create a sense of ownership and pride that’s infectious to their families.
Cultural Celebration Days
Celebrate the rich tapestry of cultures within your afterschool program by organizing Cultural Celebration Days. Families can share their heritage through food, music, dance, and storytelling. These events enrich the community’s understanding of each other’s backgrounds. They also create a vibrant and inclusive atmosphere that families will want to be a part of.
Family Skill Swaps: Learn From Each Other
Encourage parents and guardians to share their own skills and talents by hosting a Family Skill Swap. Whether it’s a cooking class, a craft workshop, or a tech tutorial, this initiative allows families to contribute their expertise while engaging with the program in a meaningful way. Plus, it strengthens the sense of community as families connect over shared interests.
Creative Feedback Loops: Listening and Adapting
Make sure you’re actively listening to what families want and need. Generate a creative feedback loop where parents and guardians can easily share their thoughts and suggestions. This could be through interactive surveys, suggestion boxes, or regular focus groups. Using their feedback helps you tailor the program to suit families’ needs and shows them that their voices are valued and heard.
Tips From the Pros
- The new Family Engagement Core Competencies report from the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement takes an in-depth look at professional competencies for the family engagement field.
- A blog post from American Institutes for Research states that “systematic reviews of core competencies for afterschool staff suggest some consensus regarding the skill areas that appear in various competency frameworks.” Partnering with families and communities is one of those skills.
Engaging families in OST programs is all about making connections and creating memorable experiences. By implementing these innovative strategies, you'll not only enhance the value of your program’s offerings but also build a thriving, supportive community where everyone feels invested in and excited about their child’s learning journey. So, get ready to sprinkle some creativity into your program and watch as families flock to join in the fun!
Turning Tides: What Works in Guiding Positive Student Behavior
When a student is disruptive or acts out of line, it’s easy to let our first reaction be one guided by snap judgments and impatience. However, it’s important to remember that the interactions we have with our students now can have lasting impacts on how they interact with others in the future. It’s likely that some of your students have experienced traumatic events, which can harm physical and mental health. That’s why it’s important to take a trauma-informed approach to guiding positive student behavior — so you can support these students without reactivating traumatic feelings. How can you ensure that you’re primed to guide positive student behavior, and how can you incorporate this practice into your program? Read on, take notes, and take heart!
Behavior Is Communication
Before you can guide behavior, you need to understand it — yours and your students’. Let’s start with you: We all show up with our own stressors, feelings, and behaviors. If you have a bad morning because a car tire blew out, you might walk into your program feeling aggravated and stressed. Managing emotions, biases, and responses to student behaviors can be difficult, but you can always learn strategies to use with students and with yourself that will make this much easier. Here are some things to keep in mind:
Negative student behavior is seldom about you. Behavior is a form of communication. Consider what a disruptive behavior is telling you and what underlying emotion or unmet need might be causing it. Factors that can influence behavior include:
- Unlearned skills
- Unmet developmental needs
- Hunger
- Lack of sleep
- Trauma
- Learned behaviors
- Medical conditions
Behaviors that seem irrational or hard to explain often have a purpose and function. Behaviors typically serve one of two purposes — to get something (attention, perhaps) or to avoid something (like completing an assignment). Here are four functions of behavior:
- Attention: Wanting feedback from a facilitator or peer (e.g., temper tantrums, interruptions)
- Escape: Wanting to avoid doing something (e.g., running away from an activity, suddenly feeling too sick to participate)
- Access to tangibles: Trying to get something that they can touch or have, like a toy or cookie (e.g., begging, screaming)
- Sensory stimulation: Trying to experience a pleasant sensation or replace discomfort (e.g., jumping, hand flapping, fidgeting)
Overcoming Biases
Beliefs, prejudices, and attitudes about individuals and groups all fall under explicit biases, which can cause us to make instant (but not always accurate) judgments. Implicit biases are unconscious attitudes, reactions, and stereotypes that affect our behavior. To ensure that you support students, it’s important to identify and overcome (or at least reduce) the effects of any explicit or implicit biases you may have. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Refrain from ignoring a potential issue by saying “I do not see color or race.” Though rooted in positive intentions, this mindset essentially says, "This is the way things are, and nothing needs to change. "
- Uncover potential biases by taking self-assessments like the Implicit Association Test (IAT). This makes it easier to recognize where to incorporate antibias teaching strategies.
- Get to know students and coworkers on a deeper level. Set aside time for facilitated questioning and intentional activities that allow for active listening, understanding, and empathy.
- Providing equitable learning opportunities for students can support academic growth. The presence of implicit biases might cause you to group students by perceived ability level, but exposing the entire group to grade-level resources and activities can help every student grow.
- Ensure that all teaching materials are culturally responsive and relevant so students can see themselves in the material, so they’ll be more receptive to learning — and more comfortable!
Using Restorative Practices
We all have our own history of experiences with discipline in the school setting. Some of us experienced verbal corrections, exclusionary discipline, or even corporal punishment. Thankfully, we now understand that these practices often don’t have positive outcomes for students. As practitioners, we want to keep students in our program, because that’s where they’ll have the greatest opportunity to grow and learn. So instead of an old-school approach that might exacerbate existing trauma, let’s explore restorative practices, which start with the belief that people are profoundly relational, interconnected, and inherently good. Restorative practices aim to build healthy relationships and a sense of community to prevent conflict, and to address the needs of all people impacted by the harm. Here are some questions to ask when using restorative practices:
- What happened?
- What were you thinking at the time?
- What have you thought about since?
- Who was harmed by what you have said or done? In what way?
- How can you repair the harm?
If you’re looking for more inspiration, check out our Guiding Positive Student Behavior Toolkit for resources, and our Guiding Positive Student Behavior mini-course for an exploration on biases, supportive discipline, building lasting relationships, and more. Together with these practices and your dedication your students, you and your staff will surely continue to make your program a safe place for your students to learn, thrive, and be themselves.
Get to Know Ms. Andrea Jackson, 21st CCLC NTAC Project Officer
Impact: Share how your role contributes to supporting 21st CCLC professionals and programs.
Two phrases come to mind when I think about how my role as a program officer contributes to supporting 21st CCLC professionals and programs—alignment and continuous improvement! My work offers many opportunities to engage in activities and events that assist 21st CCLC professionals with guidance on statutory and regulatory requirements, capacity-building, consultation, and collaboration. Each complex inquiry, problem, or question offers me an opportunity to explore ways to improve the alignment of the program’s processes and/or make improvements to my efforts to support 21st CCLC professionals and programs.
Connection: How do you foster collaboration and connection between 21st CCLC programs and other partners to promote educational equity and access?
I think the 21st CCLC program office fosters strong collaboration and connection to promote education equity and access in several ways, including but not limited to, establishing partnerships with entities that support out-of-school time (OST) programming, sharing resources and strategies with other Federal agencies, and making resources and tools available to all OST-supported programs through the 21st CCLC NTAC website.
Favorites: Share your favorite book, movie, food, or hobby.
Although I enjoy many hobbies, I would have to say that my favorite hobby is dancing. When I’m dancing, I feel like I’m in my happy place!
Passions: What are you passionate about? It could be related to education or something entirely different!
Since I have spent more than half of my life working in some capacity directly or indirectly to support children, I must exclaim that I am without a doubt passionate about children!
Fun Fact: Share an interesting or surprising fact about yourself.
I love going on vacation cruises!
